DEE WILSON CONSULTING

(Originally published May 2025)

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This commentary is the fourth in a series that has discussed the influence and interaction of knowledge, social values and public policy on child welfare reform from 1965 to 2025. The initial commentary described the creation and development of the modern child protection from the mid-1960’s through 1985. The past two commentaries discussed the responses of child welfare leaders and policymakers to the doubling of the U.S. foster care population from 1986-99 and subsequent efforts to greatly reduce the number of children in foster care, including the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), in 1997. Last month’s commentary addressed the intense dissatisfaction with residential care, along with the goal of first reducing and eventually eliminating residential care, and the consequences of child welfare systems pursuing this goal without developing adequate placement alternatives for behaviorally troubled youth.

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This commentary continues the discussion of the large reduction in the U.S. foster care population from almost 443,000 in 2017 to approximately 343,000 in FY 2023, as recently announced by the federal Administration for Children, Youth and Families. The April Sounding Board utilized federal FY 2022 foster care data. FY 2023 AFCARS data indicates that the number of children in foster care on September 30 fell from 369,000 in 2022 to 343,000 in 2023, a 7% decline after a 17% decline between FY 2018 - FY 2022. Approximately 95,000 fewer children entered foster care in the U.S. during FY 2023 compared to FY 2017 (175,000 in 2023 vs. 270,000 in FY 2017).  In some states, including Washington, the number of children in foster care has declined by one-third to one-half since 2018, mainly due to a reduction in entries-into-care.  According to AFCARS data, approximately 1800 fewer children entered foster care in Washington during FY 2022 than in FY 2019 (3518 vs. 5336). This recent data understates the extent of foster care reduction in Washington, a state in which for almost two decades about 8,000 children entered foster care annually, though more than a third of these entries were due to family conflict or children’s behavior problems rather than child maltreatment.     

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What has caused the recent decline in foster care?

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Both nationally and in Washington, the number of children in foster care began its recent decline at the peak of the opioid epidemic that led to more than 100,000 overdose deaths annually. This decline began before federal Family First legislation was implemented and had even a modest effect on available services. This decline continued during a workforce crisis compounded by the pandemic that left many child welfare agencies with high vacancy rates, inexperienced workforces, and overwhelming workloads.  No new assessment tools or safety frameworks were introduced during this period, and (except for Washington State) there were not widespread changes in law which narrowed legal standards for involuntary removal of children. The reduction of entries-into-foster care which accelerated during the pandemic year, 2020, continued during the years following the pandemic, with no apparent end in sight.

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What could account for a decrease in foster care of this magnitude during a substance abuse epidemic, absent new knowledge and/or improved CPS assessment practices, and/or a large increase in family support and substance abuse treatment services, or changes in legal mandates, with the notable exception of Washington’s Keeping Families Together Act (KFTA) implemented on July 1, 2023?  The likely answer: dramatic changes in social attitudes regarding both foster care and the harms of child maltreatment precipitated by the first Trump Administration’s separation of children from their migrant parents at the U.S. Southern border (and elsewhere), the careless and cruel treatment of these children and families by federal agencies, compounded by the murder of George Floyd, which led to an intense reckoning with the legacies of racism directed at Black Americans. 

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Articulate and vocal critics of child welfare were successful in convincing a critical mass of child advocates, child welfare managers and practitioners that involuntary removal of Black and American Indian children from their families by child welfare authorities was as unnecessary, unjust and emotionally damaging to children as the separation of children from undocumented migrant families, and was a flagrant instance of structural racism. Emphasizing the harm to families of CPS interventions, while ignoring or minimizing the harms of child maltreatment, became a progressive virtue that has had a strong influence on child welfare training programs.    

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This change in social attitudes followed years of persistent criticism of foster care for deficiencies that have long been apparent: high rates of placement instability, especially among behaviorally troubled children and youth, overuse of psychotropic medications to control oppositional behavior, foster parent shortages leading to overcrowding of foster homes, inadequate care and licensing violations, and increased concern regarding child safety, especially of adolescents based on information from older youth aging out-of-care, and on high profile child maltreatment fatalities involving foster children in some states.  These concerns were supported by numerous stories of children and youth removed from their families only to be moved from home to home, mistreated by foster parents, separated from siblings and left without a permanent or stable family, published in journals such as The Imprint. Foster care placement came to be seen as a misfortune, often worse than growing up with periodic serious or chronic child abuse or neglect.  Given these increasingly prevalent views of foster care, many caseworkers and other decision makers came to the conclusion that child removal could only be justified in the direst circumstances, e.g., after a child has been seriously injured due to child maltreatment or when parents are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, coming off of a lengthy drug binge or floridly mentally ill.     

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The negative views of foster care that have been widely promulgated during recent years are valid reflections of some foster youths’ bitter experience in foster care, but do not do justice to the excellent care of children provided by many thousands of foster parents, sometimes at great expense to themselves and without much public agency support. They are also not a balanced reflection of foster care research regarding developmental outcomes for foster children, which is quite mixed both in the U.S. and other countries. These critiques have served the policy goal of greatly reducing the foster care population, and in this regard have been remarkably successful. There has been little or no interest in foster care reform despite the lack of good alternatives for hundreds of thousands of American children. After all, why invest in making foster care a therapeutic experience when the goal is to eliminate it or depend solely on kinship care when a child cannot be safely cared for by the parents?  

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Misrepresenting child maltreatment and minimizing its harms

 

The social attitudes that have led to a large reduction in the U.S. foster care population in recent years have been supported by several half-truths, misrepresentations or mistaken ideas regarding child maltreatment and its effects:

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• Neglect is enmeshed with poverty (true), and allegations of neglect solely due to parents’ lack of income has frequently been the basis for involuntary child removal (false). Involuntary child removal due to neglect almost always involves concerns with parental substance abuse, mental illness and/or domestic violence, as well as poverty. For these families, poverty related services alone are not an effective prevention strategy.
   

• Neglect occurs independently of physical abuse, sexual abuse or emotional abuse (true for situational neglect and occasionally for sporadic neglect, almost always false for chronic neglect).
   

• Involuntary child removal often does more harm to children than growing up with severe or chronic child maltreatment.  An American Bar Association research summary on this theme has had great effect on judicial decision making in Washington State. However, this report is not a balanced discussion of the large body of research on the physical health and mental health effects (and early mortality) across the life span of adverse childhood experiences such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, parental substance abuse or mental illness, domestic violence, as well as separation from a parent at an early age. In ACEs research, it is the number of adversities (rather than any one specific adversity) that has the most damaging effect on health and mortality outcomes for both children and adults.             

 

Various types of child maltreatment, as well as the chronically relapsing conditions such as substance misuse and mood disorders with which they are associated, and separation from families, not only frequently traumatizes children but damages their health and mental health throughout their lives. This research-based understanding of the long-term effects of childhood aversities explains why child protection systems should not embrace a mission focused solely on immediate child safety. Developmental repair must be a part of the mission of child protection systems informed by the science of child development.

Alternatives to foster care?

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For years, child welfare leaders and child advocates assumed that the goal of safe reduction of foster care populations could only be achieved by development of a wide array of behavioral health and other family support services. To this end, influential foundations, child welfare directors and legislative allies worked persistently to achieve federal finance reform that would allow child welfare agencies to utilize IV-E funds, the main federal funding stream for foster care, to prevent the need for out-of-home placement of children. These efforts were realized in the passage of Family First legislation in 2018, legislation that many proponents believed would transform child welfare by funding evidence-based prevention programs. Yet (as mentioned above) Family First required years to implement and has had a modest effect in developing alternatives to foster care.

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For the most part, the reduction in foster care across the U.S. has occurred without large new investments in services or safety planning, due to a dramatic change in social values and social attitudes regarding both foster care and child welfare as a whole.

As the number of children in foster care began to sharply decline in Washington and nationally, I anticipated that a significant percentage of the savings created by foster care reduction would be re-invested in developing much improved family support systems to strengthen child protection in these new circumstances. When this did not occur, I began to reassess the perspective of caseworkers, advocates and policymakers:

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1. When caseworkers believe that foster care does more harm than good and is inherently racist when Black or American Indian children are removed from the home, no alternative to foster care is needed to justify leaving the child with parents regardless of their challenges, histories of child maltreatment or need for various types of assistance. An experienced child welfare manager recently told me the following story. The manager attended a staffing where a decision was made to leave a child in a home under risky conditions and close the case. When the caseworker was asked how she felt about this decision, the answer was: “At least we did not place the child in foster care.” Translation: leaving the child in the home which caseworkers and supervisors understood to be high risk was an act of child protection, i.e. protecting the child from the trauma of child removal. Furthermore, closing the case rather than offering services may have been justified on the grounds that “voluntary” services may include an implicit threat of legal action if the parents refuse services.  
    

2. Many child welfare leaders have had the single-minded goal of reducing foster care by half, in line with the stated mission of Casey Family Programs during recent years. When this goal has been almost realized without large new investments in family support services and therapeutic services, why should child welfare directors use political capital to advocate for reinvestment of foster care savings in services to prevent foster placement? Furthermore, the immediate crisis confronting many state and county child welfare systems is the challenge of recruiting and retaining a qualified workforce. Any savings generated by foster care reductions policymakers allowed by policymakers to be used for other purposes could be invested in recruitment and retention initiatives.   
    

3. Given the lack of cogent and credible measures of child safety, and the resulting uncertainty regarding the effects of any change in child protection policy or practice in most states, why assume that the large reduction on foster care has endangered children? In Washington, this question has been answered by annual Ombuds fatality and near fatality reports, but these measures or reports do not exist in most states.  There is a genuine uncertainty regarding the effects of foster care reductions on child safety because public agencies lack cogent and credible measures of safety outcomes, an unconscionable deficiency in states with huge amounts of administrative data regarding children’s health and well-being.    

 

On a positive note, some state child welfare systems, including Washington’s, have greatly increased expenditures on poverty related services during the past few years. Washington State has also expanded use of Early Childhood Courts in dependency cases, and has funded an innovative housing program for families and youth with child welfare involvement, though this program has faced implementation challenges. It is unclear whether these programs will survive the anti-public services agenda of the Trump Administration.  Nevertheless, in Washington State there is a foundation of family support services to build on if and when there is the political will to develop comprehensive family support programs essential for child protection, including a much larger investment in residential treatment programs for women with histories of substance misuse and their infants. 

        

Summary

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During the past several years, changes in social attitudes and the values they reflect have had far more influence on child welfare practice than research findings, knowledge of child maltreatment, resources/services, or changes in law. Research that does not conform to emerging social values critical of child protection has been ignored or angrily rejected.

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The transformation of child welfare values implicit in the large reduction of foster care during a workforce crisis and without major new investments in family support services suggests both a societal and public agency reconsideration of the goal of child protection similar to the perspectives of some child welfare abolitionists who implicitly deny or minimize the harms of child maltreatment.  

    

I have worked in or around child welfare agencies and/or otherwise closely followed child welfare developments since the early 1970’s. I question whether there has been another time (than now) during the past fifty years when there was a weaker commitment to child protection among child advocates, or less interest in knowledge of child maltreatment within child welfare agencies or among child advocates. Nevertheless, there is evident motivation among child advocates and child welfare leaders to develop more family friendly child welfare systems with much larger investments in prevention.  

 

It remains to be seen whether there is the political will within public child welfare systems to renew the commitment to child protection, or whether the unwillingness to do so in the current social milieu will lead to the continued disintegration of child protection programs and a repurposing of child welfare systems, while other administrative arrangements are developed for child protection.

   

References

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Davi, N., “Foster Care and Adoption Statistics - AFCARS 2025,” National Council for Adoption, May 13, 2025.

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Racine, N., Bellis, M., Madigan, S., “An Introduction to twenty- five years of adverse childhood experiences: A special issue,” Child Abuse and Neglect, published online, December 26, 2024.

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Raz, M. & Sankaran, V., “Opposing Family Separation Policies for the Welfare of Children,” American Journal of Public Health, 109 (11), November 2019.

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“Trauma Caused by Separation of Children from Parents: A Tool to Help Lawyers,” American Bar Association, 2019.   

 

​See past Sounding Board commentaries     

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©Dee Wilson     

  

deewilson13@aol.com

    

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